The Italians themselves rarely seemed to accept this propaganda of hate. They were almost terrorized by Allied bombing. But what they expressed on the basis of their own experience of the bombings was not a hatred of the American ‘gangsters’ dropping the bombs. Instead, they were shocked, incredulous, and angry at what was perceived to be the total inadequacy of the authorities’ preparation and response. People’s letters were full of criticisms of the poor performance of the Italian air force and of the country’s anti-aircraft defences, which left cities defenceless against bombing attacks. They also spoke of air raid sirens either not sounding before raids, which caught people unawares, or sounding continuously, false alarms which forced people in and out of shelters. The public and private shelters
were regarded as death traps, poorly constructed and maintained, and always
dangerously overcrowded.
The Sicilian cities of Palermo and Catania were bombed throughout the war. Like most cities on the island and in the south, they were always in the range of Allied bombers and they took a particularly intense battering before and during the Allied invasion of Sicily in June and July 1943. When
the bombings started and were still a dramatic novelty, people in Palermo, and in the other bombed cities, naturally tended to exaggerate the destructive impact of the raids on lives and property. The imagining of destruction was part of the frisson and terror which the early bombings induced. But later,
police reporting to their superiors in Rome and shocked residents writing to friends and family elsewhere in Italy, almost exactly coincided in their descriptions of a bombed-out city on its knees, recording in prosaic, concrete, eyewitness terms the breakdown of public services and utilities. The city in early 1943 had long since given up on being adequately defended against bombing raids. It was by this point not even being defended against their consequences. Fires burnt themselves out; survivors cleared and scavenged
through the rubble, unaided and unguided. In a report which we know reached Mussolini’s desk on the eve of the Grand Councilmeeting, the police chief of Catania succinctly summarized the situation in the city: ‘without flour and without water, 30,000 people who crowd into unsafe shelters are subjected, day and night, to incessant terrifying naval and air bombardment which is transforming the city into a heap of ruins’.
...
... it was unlikely that the regime could ever get Italians to hate the Americans who were bombing them. For many Italians, especially from the south and the islands, the USA was their Wrst, let alone their second, fatherland, still the land of migration, opportunity, and the second chance. The consumerism and materialism of US culture, so derided in Fascist wartime propaganda, was precisely what attracted many Italians to the USA, or the idea of the USA. If anything, the stock of the USA was enhanced during and as a result of the war, as defeated Italian soldiers acknowledged to themselves and others that such material abundance, expressed in better provisions, better equipment, and better weapons, was enabling the Allies to win the war.
